> Paypal's customer service isn't bad because they don't trust the customer in terms of authentication - it's bad because they have horrible policies in place
This is true. I got locked out of my Paypal account because I had the audacity to log in from a nearby country (Germany). Fair enough, though maybe a bit overzealous. To get control back they then had to charge a small, random amount of money to my account and phone my registered phone number to give me a code to input. Reasonable, perhaps, except that it didn't work! and to this day still hasn't. I can't count the number of times I entered in the code. So I just created a new account with an alternative email instead . . .
This was a few years ago admittedly, so maybe they're better now, but it's one thing to have overzealous policies and quite another to implement those policies poorly. And that's not even getting into the one time I actually needed PayPal buyer protection, because I'm sure we could all be sharing PayPal horror stories all day if we go down that road.
This is true. I got locked out of my Paypal account because I had the audacity to log in from a nearby country (Germany). Fair enough, though maybe a bit overzealous. To get control back they then had to charge a small, random amount of money to my account and phone my registered phone number to give me a code to input. Reasonable, perhaps, except that it didn't work! and to this day still hasn't. I can't count the number of times I entered in the code. So I just created a new account with an alternative email instead . . .
This was a few years ago admittedly, so maybe they're better now, but it's one thing to have overzealous policies and quite another to implement those policies poorly. And that's not even getting into the one time I actually needed PayPal buyer protection, because I'm sure we could all be sharing PayPal horror stories all day if we go down that road.